If only that were true and they just left macOS alone
Instead they have turned it in to mess
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Liquid Glass - A must read critique
- Thread starter turbineseaplane
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If only that were true and they just left macOS alone
Instead they have turned it in to mess
funny, you call someone a moron… While ignoring the fact that the current design head has worked at Apple since before the iPhone announcement.
“Hired a moron”? Yeah, I guess if you truly believe that, then you aren’t really a fan of the Jobs era… because that is who he was hired by.
Dye has ascended through the ranks and the further up he's gone, the worse things have gotten..
"Worked on iOS7" should almost be disqualifying on its own.
Alan Dye
A graduate of Syracuse University, Dye has been at Apple since 2006, arriving at the company as a "creative director." Starting from the marketing and communications team, Dye's ideas for the boxes products were packaged inside, such as painting the corners by hand to eliminate scuffs, helped propel him into new roles, sending him into the human interface group at the company.In that role, he worked on iOS 7, and worked closely with Ive at the conception of the Apple Watch, helping create the interface for the wearable device. In a 2015 interview, Ive said "Alan has a genius for human interface design. So much of the Apple Watch's operating system came from him."
At the time of Ive's ascent to CDO in 2015, Dye was joined by Richard Howarth to handle day-to-day affairs within the design teams, but their positions were diminished when Ive returned to have a more hands-on approach to management in late 2017.
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Well we had the skeuomorphic phase and the flat low contrast design phase and now we have the glass phase. All under Jobs hiring.
Clearly my point stands.
Morons. Wall to wall.
(Note: used to do interaction design and test tooling for things that kill people if they go wrong so I’m fairly qualified to call out a moron when i see one).
I feel like the new icon design kind of makes sense when you've seen the old one, you can probably figure out that it's supposed to be migration assistant, because there was also a rightward arrow in the original. Of course, this makes absolutely zero sense. The people most in need of the Migration Assistant are those new to macOS, who wouldn't be familiar with the icons already. The old icon showed you everything you needed to know what it does.
Even with Mac OS 9 Apple had the sense in themselves to make button shapes that were obviously buttons. They had a border which looked like a button (a real life one), the fill color was darker, and when you clicked it it would darken to slow that it was "pushed in". The list there doesn't have extreme amounts of padding above and below each element, and it's incredibly obvious the Position control is disabled, it doesn't have the 3D-ish button effect, and the text is noticeably grayed out. This is also used on the title bars to indicate which window is in the front, the background window title bar is brightened up and is missing the texture.
This doesn't exist anymore, everything is white, can't make it more white, everything is smashed together, no room for any texture (at least for the Big Sur design style). And of course the buttons in BS macOS don't have button shapes by default.
As for System Preferences specifically, notice how even in Mac OS 9 there were multiple controls laid out horizontally (makes sense, most desktops have a wide screen). But on Ventura System Settings, everything is laid out vertically, as a list with one singular control taking up the entirety of the width. It's designed for a phone, where you have extremely limited horizontal space and ample vertical space (basically the opposite of a desktop computer). It's absolute nonsense, and what's worse is that the new System Settings stutters all the time on my M1 MBA.
I'm sure people will say that this design is outdated, ugly, maybe not the best. But there's a difference between the look (the 'art" component) and the functional component, and that's the problem with modern macOS. Apple is throwing away functional components so that they can make it look nicer, and in the end it just becomes harder to use. Mac OS from the start was always very usable, yet slowly they make it worse and worse. It started with Yosemite, I always hated the "whiteneing" of everything, when they removed textures and reduced contrast everything just started to become so white. And then of course all the weird design decisions on Big Sur.
I have been going back to older Macs, and using older versions of OS X whenever I don't need the latest browser or the most performance. It's just nicer to work on. Rarely do I miss features, Spotlight, QuickLook, and Spaces have all been there since 10.6, and those are arguably some of the best features of macOS.
You can change any keyboard shortcut, this is one of the biggest "little things" macOS gets right over Windows.
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they haven't applied any liquid glass effects to logic yet
Speaking of new icons ... bleh
New one (2025-) is the worst IMO.
New one (2025-) is the worst IMO.
they haven't messed with logic yet
it's quite striking to see a normal window and a liquid glass window side by side to see how much space liquid glass wastes with all of the extra padding and shadows
it's quite striking to see a normal window and a liquid glass window side by side to see how much space liquid glass wastes with all of the extra padding and shadows
This is absolutely spot on
Literally!
Like ... what the actual hell are they doing!??
The one on the right (the new one) is awful.
take a look at how the "stop lights" line up between the two
has anyone found a way to get rid of these icons?
why would they? the app is not the OS. and both apps work fine here (not bad for an early beta).
why wouldn't they when they've applied it to the rest of their apps?
of course they work fine, there's not much change in Tahoe other than the liquid glass skinning
Omg. They are absolutely DRUNK on encapsulating everything in a pill and rounding everything to death..
And the radius isn’t even correctly matching, if it’s supposed to 🤷♂️. I’m not even sure if that Apple logo is centered in the blob either.
Honestly I find the worst (in page linked earlier, I won't copy the pictures: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history) is the Dictionary (which was mentioned earlier in the thread). It's functionally no different from the Font Book, the only majorly distinguishing feature is the fact that it's red, which by Apple's own requirements, the fact that these icons have to be "usable" when they are transparent, isn't even useful. I don't know what a red box has to do with a Dictionary (again, see my earlier post, these icons only make sense if you remember the old icons, where the Dictionary book was red).
Same with this icon, those blurry dots are supposed to represent checkmarks, like actual hand-written check marks on a to do list. The lines were supposed to represent actual text, I don't know why Apple didn't write actual text on the original reminders icon, the wrote milk, eggs, and a phone number on the original OS X Stickies icon.
If you take a look at the App Store icon, I think it's telling of what's wrong (if you read a bit too much into it). The icon used to be tools: a paint brush, ruler, and pencil. Now, it seems to me like the designer was just trying to make an abstract A (hey, look, yet another app icon with an A on it). I guess the A stands for App? But what is an app? Originally they were supposed to be tools, for creating things or doing work. Now, apps are not tools: they're just consumption. Why else would apple keep repeating how Liquid Glass helps people "focus on the underlying content"? (I'm ignoring the doublespeak because the opposite is actually happening, the floating UI elements are decidedly distracting)
It's like the sqaurification of the app icons, they used to be unique and identifiable, the actual shape of the icon used to indicate how it was to be used, utilities were different from productivity apps (Morrick goes over this in the old HIG), now they are bland and devoid of detail. Remember when Apple said macOS icons in Big Sur could still stick out, at least a little bit. That's gone now, Apple wants conformity.
The ironic part is that fewer and fewer apps actually conform to what matters, having the same functional design language and familiar user interface patters as the other apps on the system. Instead, most new apps are electron apps and do away with system-specific design (either macOS or Windows) and instead invent their own arbitrary or web-like interfaces on their bloated, battery-draining mess.
This is all such a disaster.
It will take years of revisions to correct some of this stuff, if it even happens at all.
It will take years of revisions to correct some of this stuff, if it even happens at all.
they even made this freeway onramp glass
Oh these screenshots. I can’t sell my Apple stuff fast enough at the moment. Even the whole “think of the children” scandal of image scanning and reporting was less offensive.
So far: iPad Pro, Mac mini, two USB dongles, spare Apple Watch SE, two spare iPhones.
To go: MBP, studio display, Magic Keyboard, iPad keyboard.
Going to spend some more time today extracting Apple photos stuff out so I can unpeel that dependency.
I am so so so disgusted by this direction change.
So far: iPad Pro, Mac mini, two USB dongles, spare Apple Watch SE, two spare iPhones.
To go: MBP, studio display, Magic Keyboard, iPad keyboard.
Going to spend some more time today extracting Apple photos stuff out so I can unpeel that dependency.
I am so so so disgusted by this direction change.
I literally just had to get glasses to make everything stop looking like this.
I hope they put a setting in accessibility for this. These icons serve almost 0 purpose.
Funny. But the fact that every icon now must be a squircle is way more unappealing to me than every icon being made out of glass.
Although, thinking a bit more about this - take the Xcode. Hammer, that has for a long time now been an identifying symbol of Xcode being made out of glass is not really instilling confidence into the software that's being built using the Xcode. I wouldn't trust a carpenter who whipped out a glass hammer to hammer some nails, I would either think he's nuts or he's screwing around.
Alright, I'll grab my coat and go touch the grass.
where exactly would you expect them to apply liquid glass in logic and final cut? in my experience, the app GUIs change only when the apps themselves hit a new version; and the curved window edges i'm looking at right now in logic is as far as it goes (and other OS -level things like save windows, etc).
anyway, i don't worry in advance about things that probably won't happen 🤷